Short answers, pulled from the story.
William Wyvill Fitzhugh IV is an American archaeologist and anthropologist who directs the Smithsonian's Arctic Studies Center and serves as a Senior Scientist at the National Museum of Natural History. He studies arctic and sub-arctic peoples, cultural responses to climate and environmental change, and European contact across the circumpolar region, from Labrador to Mongolia.
Fitzhugh established the Arctic Studies Center in 1988 as the only U.S. government program with a dedicated focus on northern cultural research and education. It is part of the Department of Anthropology at the National Museum of American History and maintains a division in Anchorage, Alaska.
Fitzhugh co-initiated major traveling exhibitions including "Inua: Spirit World of the Bering Sea Eskimo" (1982), "Crossroads of Continents: Cultures of Siberia and Alaska" (1988), "Ainu: Spirits of a Northern People" (1999), and "Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga" (2000). The Vikings exhibition earned a cover story in Time magazine.
The catalogue "Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga," co-edited by Fitzhugh and Elisabeth I. Ward, won the Society for American Archaeology Book Award for 2001. The 424-page volume accompanied the 2000 exhibition at the Smithsonian.
Fitzhugh conducted fieldwork in Mongolia, studying Bronze Age deer stones along the forest-steppe border between Tuva and Mongolia. His research suggested possible connections between these monuments and Scythian art of Western Asia, as well as early Bering Sea Eskimo art. Results were published in a 2005 volume covering fieldwork from 2002 to 2004.
Fitzhugh received his PhD in anthropology from Harvard University in 1970. His dissertation focused on the environmental archaeology and cultural systems of coastal Labrador. He was introduced to the field earlier by Professor Elmer Harp at Dartmouth College.